


heavy in your arms

by Psythe



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Break Up, Bulges and Nooks (Homestuck), Dom/sub, F/F, Hypnotic Bondage, Hypnotic Rainbow Drinker Powers, Hypnotism, Non-physical bondage, Pale Porn, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Past Relationship(s), Post-Sburb/Sgrub, consensual hypnosis, in every sense possible, rails with pails
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-11
Updated: 2019-08-11
Packaged: 2020-08-18 23:03:03
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20199619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Psythe/pseuds/Psythe
Summary: Latula's not adjusting terribly well to the post-Sgrub state of things. Poorly enough to throw her longest-standing, most reliable relationship into question. But, for every old habit left behind, there's another one to fall back into. Porrim and Latula were black once, and in her grief she asks Porrim to resurrect an old ritual from those days, using a particularly odd ability of her rainbow drinker body. But they're both very different people now, and maybe what they had back then wasn't what either of them wanted - or what they need.





	heavy in your arms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MirageOasis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MirageOasis/gifts).

> Prompt:
> 
> "Latula has had to make the most difficult decision of her life: Breaking off with Mituna. She really does love him, but being with him for so long had left her drained. She goes to her moirail, Porrim (Whether they've admitted it to themselves or not, it's true), for comfort. Luckily, she knows exactly what she can do to give Latula the break she needs."
> 
> Boy. This was tough. Words were very hard for me this month. I really hope you like it, I feel like I was really off my game and I've never written either of these two before. But the end result is sweet, and I do like it, especially the end, which I'm very fond of. I hope the scenario is amenable to you - your submission gave a good sense of your tastes so I mixed some of your kinks together, and I don't know that I gave Mituna and Latula as much of a clean break as your prompt might have suggested. That was a touch too sad for me, so I left them room for a potential happy ending. Merry Drone Season!

_ It was her idea, of course. _

_ You’d never have done this otherwise. You definitely enjoyed it, back in the day, and you think back on it fondly sometimes. (Sometimes more than fondly, at night, before you get into your ‘cupe. The fact of the matter is that it was really, really hot.) But it was a long time ago. You aren’t spades anymore, to whatever degree you ever were spades, and the delicate, complex architecture of consent and emotional context that existed back then that allowed this to work was dismantled long ago, left to fade away into the void between two people who are no longer as close as they wish they were. _

_ But, then, she asked you for it. _

_ She plodded into your stem-hive, her vibe uncharacteristically low-energy, after a few (rather more characteristically) hard bangs on your door, and just sort of draped herself over the back of your couch. _

_ “Porrrrrrrrimm,” she’d groaned. _

_ “That is my name, yes,” you’d said. “No eye-rolling nickname today?” _

_ She lifted a hand, tilted it back and forth. “Ehh. Effort.” _

_ “Would you like a drink?” you said. You like to at least try to be a good host. “I would have had something more elaborate than that, but you did only text me that you were going to show up a few minutes ago.” _

_ “Yeah, rofles,” she’d rolled over, her posture pole curving backwards to accomodate her, “Sorry about that. I wasn’t thinkin’ super clear. Bad Mind player conduct, I know,” _

_ You sighed. “We don’t have to think about things in those terms any more. As much as Kanaya’s matesprit and her ancestors might like to say otherwise. I think that showing up almost unprompted and expecting hospitality from someone is just sort of rude, and not particular to any given aspect or class.” _

_ “I broke up with Mituna,” she’d blurted. _

That_ threw you. _

_ You didn’t think anything could really surprise you anymore in the realm of quadrant drama, but … by now you basically thought that Latula and Mituna were solid as concrete, or gravity. _

_ “Why?” you’d asked, honestly feeling at a loss for words. _

_ After a few moments, she mumbled, “...I don’t even know.” _

* * *

“Latula,” you say, experimentally. “Can you hear me?”

“Yeah...” she nods, slowly. Her eyes are wide and absent as they stare at the flickering pattern of arresting strobe lights emanating from your body. When you did this last, her irises were still polychrome; flecked extensively with a scattering of teal and yellow arranged without pattern - and then they were white, and empty, forever. Now they’re pure, solid teal that rings her huge, enlarged pupils, vibrant and gorgeous.

“You know that you can’t lie to me, correct?” you say.

Her head bobs up and down. “Yeah...”

“You’ll tell me the absolute truth.”

“The … absolute truth. One … hundo percent.”

Your mouth smiles fondly, before you can even think too hard about it. Even under the thrall of a rainbow drinker, Latula is still Latula.

“Why did you come to see me?” you ask. It’s important to test the extent of your influence - not so much to assess your control (that’s never been in doubt) but to symbolically establish your dominance.

“Because I … couldn’t … handle my feelings,” Latula says, detached, “and I … always feel … like I can talk … to you. Like you… burrow down … to the root… of things. Like you’ll… call me… on my hoofbeastshit.”

That’s interesting. A familiar, but still unexpected feeling stirs in your thorax.

“Latula,” you say, making your voice more forceful, taking a step towards her, so that even more of her vision is filled with your glow’s special optical wavelength. “You can’t lie to me.”

“I can’t lie to you,” she responds, dully.

“You remember our old safeword?”

“Uh-huh.” She nods again, her head rocking sluggishly up and down.

“Good. Just like before, if you say ‘lame’, you’ll be released from your trance, and none of my commands or suggestions will have any power over you anymore. Understood?”

“Uh...huh. Jus’... say it, ‘n you won’t … have any power.”

“Good. Now, Latula. You remember how we used to do this. But I’m going to repeat it again, because it’s been a while, and I know both of us enjoy it. Sit down here,” You pat the side of your concupiscent platform. “You can’t stop looking at me, can you?” you ask her as she sinks onto it.

“Nuh-huh,” she says, helplessly.

“You can’t even stop looking at me and my beautiful glow, even when your eyes are closed.”

“Can’t. Stop looking.”

“I’m going to count down from five. When I hit zero, your eyes will close, but you’ll still see my glow on the inside of your eyelids.”

You count, and even as you go from ‘one’ to ‘two’, her brows are drooping. Latula does have a well-hidden submissive streak, but perhaps not quite this much of one. As her eyes shut, the muscles of her face are slackening, tension rolling out of her. Maybe it’s not submissiveness, maybe it’s just the need to relax.

“Take off your leggings.” She rolls her bottoms down, revealing her long, sleek, muscled legs. 

You set her feet on the floor so that her legs are spread apart. “Your walkstubs are so heavy,” you say, “They feel like gravity’s increased a hundred times on them, a thousand times. You can’t move them at all. Your hands, too, they feel heavy like you were in a thousand times gravity…”

* * *

_You discovered it during your session._

_ One of a bunch of things you discovered, of course. Rainbow drinkers have a wide variety of unusual abilities, unique to these specific ascended members of your caste. Some you’d already known about, but the knowledge was a bit light on the ground for you with how much time you insisted on spending away from your cavern-bound castemates. But SGRUB brought out a lot of things in a lot of people, and you had _ plenty _ of time to explore the secrets hidden in your own biology. _

_ And eventually, you learned that if you do it _ just _ right, you can make your luminescence flash on and off at a very specific frequency. _

_When a troll looks at you while you’re flashing like this, it sets off some kind of deep-rooted impulse in troll physiology. Exactly how it came about, why the mother grub installed this hardcoded super-pacification response, no one’s a hundred percent sure. What is for sure is that it stuns them, and brings them into a fascinated state where they can’t really do anything other than stare at the source of the flashing. They become very suggestible, and submissive to the will of the rainbow drinker, and incapable of resisting commands._

_ You explored it with Aranea first. At first it had made you uncomfortable - it inherently introduced a pretty considerable ethical dilemma into your life. You hadn’t done anything to prove yourself worthy of the responsibility of this kind of power, it was just handed to you by virtue of your caste. But Aranea had admitted that she felt the same way. That her psionics introduced an awkward power imbalance into just about any relationship she might want to have - but that your drinker powers counteracted it. (For a certain span of time, while the two of you were very specific people, you were good for one another.) _

_ So you dug into it together, and you discovered a number of very interesting and novel and very sexy applications for your hypnotic talent. And on very rare occasions, when it seemed like you shared just the right rapport with someone, you share them._

* * *

You have your hand between her thighs. You have her leggings rolled down. You have the bucket set on top of them, between her legs. (She can’t move them, so there’s no concern of her kicking and upsetting it.) 

That makes you laugh as you remember something Rose told you. “Did you know that for humans ‘kicking the bucket’ is a euphemism for dying?”

“Haha, yeah, D-dawg filled me in on that one.” Latula laughs but it’s nervous and cute. “Kinda works, though, right? If you kick one over you pretty much _ want _ to die. Embarrassing,”

Your claws are filed and manicured. (Back home on Beforus it was thought of as gauche, vulgar, an artifact of a barbaric bygone age. So, of course, you kept yours sharp. That time has passed, too, though. You’re not an embarrassing teenager now.) It improves this kind of experience a lot, you’re able to drag your clawtips lightly up the edges of her sheath, gently coaxing her casing apart. Her legs shiver and twitch, “Hold still, please,” you say. She gets in one more serious quiver and then manages to restrain herself, while you work her the rest of the way open. Glistening teal gleams between the parts of her sheath. There’s something particularly beautiful about the inside of a troll’s sheath, you’ve always thought. About the color of it. It’s so bright. It’s pure, somehow. The inner, unfiltered essence of a troll, visible through this little gap between their legs.

She unsheathes completely, her bulge dropping to dangle over the bucket. It’s as lovely as ever. It twists and curls, visibly, almost comically desperate to touch something, or to be touched. “A little thicker than I remember,” you say.

“You spend a lotta time thinkin’ about how thick I am?” She shoots back, but she sounds nervous. Her pusher’s not in mocking you.

“Just a comment,” you hum. You reach down and cup her bulge with your fingers. She whines, her chest keening an extremely specific tone you haven’t heard in sweeps and sweeps. Her rumblespheres hum at you and your body responds in kind. It’s low, and sets off one of the most deeply-buried impulses in your pan; the threat display-that-isn’t-a-threat display, the call to pitch competition. But it’s not deep enough, not aggressive enough. It’s an invitation to dominance - to _ be _ dominated.

You stroke her bulge, the entire length of it, root to tip with the ball of your thumb. It coils around your digit and ripples along with the motion, and the sound she’s making trips and vibrates and turns into a purr, something dramatically less black, and a lot more pink.

She doesn’t want to be dominated, you realize. 

She wants to be _ cared _ for.  


* * *

_You don’t directly dominate Latula’s mind with it. That would be wrong. And also boring._

_ What you do, while she’s fully under your influence, is implant a series of hypnotic compulsions that make her incapable of moving her limbs, and incapable of pailing without your assistance. You include a safeword as a post-hypnotic trigger that disables all the other commands - and then give her back all of her other faculties. _

_ It’s bondage without the ropes, without the knots, without any wrists rubbing together. She has her mind, her full complement of spirit and spunk, but without the ability to act on it. And that was important, for a lot of reasons. Back then you were pitch (or you said you were pitch), and so actually subduing her thoughts and her reactions to things would have defeated the purpose. _

_ She always seemed a lot better after you were done. One of the consequences of there only being eleven other people in the world is that you got to know them _ outrageously _ well, probably much too well, so that you got accustomed to every tiny habit and detail and quirk (and not the textual or verbal kind). Latula obviously thinks she looks cool and extreme and unconcerned, in her default state of ‘raditude.’ But all you can see when you look at her is that she seems _ tired. _ She looks nervous and strung-out. Keeping up her exoskeleton of effortless, excessively energetic coolness must be _exhausting.

_ But after the two of you were together, she seemed a lot better. Tired, certainly, still. But relaxed-tired. Good tired. You were glad you could give that to her. _

_ That probably wasn’t very black of you. You don’t know if you could ever really be black for Latula, in your pusher of pushers. She’s too pitiable, once you know her as well as you did during those sweeps. Too desperate. You want her to be better, to not need other people’s approval so badly. But you could never really be _ mad _ at her, not in any sustainable way. _

_ But black was the way she made it possible for you to deliver it. So you were black. _

_ You’re not black anymore. _  
  


* * *

“This is how it’s going to work,” you say. “I’m going to ask you questions. And every one you answer honestly, you get a stroke.” You grip her bulge and push your hand down to the base, demonstratively.

“That my free sample?” Latula gasps. “Hey now there’s a sicknasty idea. You oughtta give these out in the food dispensary. Business’d go through the roof. You’d have Paystubs and Blue-babe tryin’a buy you out,” 

“Latula,” you pull your hand away. Her bulge thrashes at the lack of contact. “You came because you wanted to slow down a little, right?”

She nods, visibly clenching her fangs with want.

“Then _ slow down. _ You know you don’t need to go, go, go all the time.”

She exhales, long and strained, and you do see some of it fall away, the tension, the anxiety, like she’s molting and revealing some deeper layer of herself.

You give her a stroke as a reward. “Good. That’s good.”

“Did you always intend to ask me to mesmerize you?” The answer won’t affect what you do with her, but it’s still important to you to know.

“...yeah.” she mumbles. “I wanted to stop thinkin’ for like five mins.”

You squeeze and stroke her. (She answered. Fair is fair.) “Would you have admitted that if you were able to tell me anything other than the truth?”

She hesitates. That’s interesting.

“Would you have admitted it?”

“...no,”

Another stroke. Slurry is pattering into the bucket beneath her. “Mm.” 

You consider for a brief moment.

“Where’s Mituna?” you ask.

Latula pants. “I dunno. He’s ok though. He’s stayin’ with Sol and Rad-ia. He’s way better now anyway, he doesn’t need me anymore,”

No stroke comes. “Porrimmmm what the eff I answered,”

“You only get to release when you’re honest.” You say, sternly. “I know Mituna is better now,” Something happened when you came through into this new world, like the shattered pieces of his brain were put back together and … flash-frozen back together. Not restored to its original condition, exactly, but … reassembled into a brittle version of the same shape. “But I think saying that he doesn’t need you isn’t fair.”

She doesn’t reply (other than to continue her labored breathing). “So why _ did _ you break up with him?”

“I dunno,”

No stroke. “Latula…”

“I dunno, Pornrim!!”

You sigh. “I thought were done with that name. Just for that, your next good answer doesn’t get a reward.”

“Porrim I’m dyin’ here,”

“This is what you signed up for.”

“No way it’s not!! I didn’t come over here to get my bulge locked up, I came here to be _ less _ tense,”

“I haven’t heard your safeword.”

You look at her, stern and imperious, until she wilts. Right now it’s expected of you to be a dom, that’s what she’s invited on herself, and you are going to provide. Either she’ll put this defiance aside and let you take care of her, or she’ll safeword.

And eventually her little spate of contrariness does fade. “You came here,” you say, lifting yourself up, your hip resting lightly against Latula’s leg, “to put yourself in my keeping. For a little while at least. So that’s what’s going to happen. While you’re here, until you safeword, I’m going to do what I think is best for you. I know that kind of thing makes you uncomfortable, so this is a good time to abort. Are you okay with this?”

After another long, long moment, she swallows, and nods yes, at which point you realize that you were invested in the answer.

You _ really _ want to take care of her. You really want her to let you do it.

Your fingers hover teasingly near her bulge. It senses your body heat - which isn’t much, but the one-caste difference is enough to draw its attention - and curls towards you, reaching out, and you retract your hand before it can touch. “Why? you ask her. She’s built more or less her whole life around not needing anyone. (Not that you don’t understand why.)

“...I dunno,” she starts.

You pinch the tip of her bulge, just enough to sting. “Stop saying that. I think you do know.”

“Porrim! God!! Okay! Fuck! We’re not on Beforus anymore, okay?? I think that’s startin’ to finally sink in a lil’! Nobody here is gonna cull me if I ever do one trick even a little wrong, but - but that’s _ scary, _ and weird, and doesn’t make sense, so it’s gotta be you, ‘cuz I didn’t ever think you _ would _ cull me even when it was the thing to do,”

Now you’re the one blushing.

“...thank you,” you say.

She smiles. Not a grin, a smile. “No probz, Po-Mary. So … can I get off for this one after all?”

You go back to scowling at her. “No. Rules are rules, I’m afraid. Why did you break up with Mituna?”

“Aaaaagh,” she rolls her head back on her shoulders and groans, “because _ all of this is scary, _

I don’t know how to deal with any of this? With being alive? And I don’t think I know how to be his red quad anymore. I was - I was basically his culler, I was already pretty much his culler before we all died, and then that was just me for so long when we were in the bubz,” Your hand is back on her bulge, pumping and stroking, steadily working the confession out of her just like you’re wringing out the genetic material, “and then suddenly we were alive and he was better - not like all the way better but he was okay, and then he got on the hoofbeast really fast it felt like, I thought he was gonna need way more help, and then - and then he he didn’t need that as much from me anymore, and I didn’t know how that worked anymore - but instead of just adjusting and figuring it out, I just … I just bailed,”

There are teal streams running down her face. You work her, steady and methodical, with one hand, while the other comes up and cradles her head while she lets it all out.

“How much do you remember?” You ask her, quietly. “Of when we were there. When we were … dead.” You slow on her bulge.

“...it varies,” she says. She’s settled into a sort of droning rhythm, a mental space that has easy access to her inner processes, her deep sincerity - with you and with herself - linked to her bulge as you squeeze it. “I remember it as kind of an … aggregate, I guess you’d say, it’s a whole era.”

You nod as you stroke her again. “Sometimes I remember a specific experience from all that time. But mostly it’s just a sort of blur. A background feeling.” (Not a good feeling, either, on average.)

“M-makes sense,” she gasps. There’s a good six inches of teal in the bucket by now. “It was, like - like - eons and eons of - of sweeps, I bet, ffffff-” you give her bulge an extra long, leisurely squeeze, from end to end, “-uuuuccccckk, Porrim,”

“Finish your thought,” you say. Your voice is casual, but it’s still a command, and she knows it.

“God, fuck, Porrim, I betcha our physical thin-thinkpans aren’t meant to hold that ma-many … many infos, so it all just … kinda…” you speed up the tempo, “kinda … compresses… ugh - uuuuugh-” Stroke. Squeeze. Drop. Drop. Spatter. Your handjob technique is refined over many moons of practice. Giving handjobs is part of the compressed memories she’s talking about. You spent a pretty considerable part of your afterlife giving handjobs. Now it’s more like ten inches in the bucket.

“Do you still love him?” you ask. You spring the question on her like an ambush, while she’s still recovering from your latest determined round of jacking.

“Yeah. I do.” (You give her a stroke for that. You know she’s being honest.) “I just…”

“You just?” You tighten your grip again, just above her root this time.

“Aah! I just - I just think maybe it’s better off this way! I kinda freaked, and I did something dumb in the moment, but … maybe it’s okay, maybe this was the only way I was gonna get here,”

“Maybe.” you say. Your heart hurts. You don’t want this for her.

“Yeah,”

“It might not be true, then. Are you willing to take that chance?”

“...yes,” she says.

You don’t like that answer, but she’s long past the point of being able to lie to you, here, so she gets a stroke. Rules are rules.

After that, though, you stop. “I don’t want you to,” you say. It’s not a command. “I don’t think you should give up what you have with him. Not without talking to him about it more.”

She looks miserable and conflicted. “Will you promise to at least think about it?” you ask her, and she nods. And that was a question, and you believe her, so she gets another stroke.

There’s over a foot in the bucket now. “You’ve been good,” you tell her, “You’ve been a good girl.” When you were pitch - or whatever it was you were - she would have hated that, and not in the fun sense. Her face still looks conflicted, but her body betrays her, trilling with contentment at your praise. “What do you want? How would you like me to touch you?”

Yet again in this encounter, she surprises you. “I want you to shoosh me,”

So much more cautiously than is your norm in quadromantic matters, you lift a hand to her cheek. You think it might be shaking a little.

When you make contact with her face she _ sighs _ , loudly, and leans into you, nuzzling your palm like a pointy teal meowbeast, you see so much of the rigidity just … melt away. Your thorax fills to the brim with soft pink feelings. You’re not prepared for how intense they are, for how _ good _ it feels to see Latula so relaxed.

“Lame,” you say, your tone as neutral as you can possibly make it, and Latula collapses against you, her wrists and ankles flexing. You carefully take her weight. “Not to suggest that anything about what’s happening here is lame. This is all the exact opposite of lame. I’d venture to say that it’s un-lame.

She laughs into you as you continue to cup her cheek. “We got a word for that, P-M.”

You raise your eyebrows elaborately, as if you couldn’t even hazard a _ guess _ as to what that might be.

“P sure we’d call it _ rad.” _

You lay back onto the concupiscent platform. You lower Latula down, gently, as your fingers delicately stroke her face. She keeps chirring at you, fluttery and uncertain, sincere in her contentment but unable to fully commit to it yet. That’s okay. You’ll have time. You hope.

“Porrim?” she says, after a minute or so. You look at one another, heads on their sides, the whole world turned ninety degrees except for Latula’s face and yours. “...thanks,”

You have no idea what your face looks like when you smile. “Of course.”

Her eyes dart downwards. “You, uh. You … wanna lil’... reciprocation? Seems, like, fair. And stuff. Even if you don’t wanna make this a Thing on the reg, no repeat performance, you took me to a real good place there and I feel like I should maybe share the wealth,”

“The wealth being handjobs,” you say.

She laughs again. You like this laugh, a little softer, a little less outrageous than her usual one, which always sounds to you like she’s ejecting it forcefully from her squawk blister. “Redistribute handjobs, babygirl,” she says, “Free handjobs for every troll, young and old,”

“This is getting weird very fast,”

“Yeah for real. Whoo. It was gonna keep gettin’ weird, too, thanks for pullin’ the ripcord, hahaha,”

You run your thumb over her cheek and tuck her sweat-streaked hair back behind the shell of her hear duct. “And…”

“And?”

“And… if you did want repeat performances…”

She swallows again as she realizes what you’re asking. “I, uh.” she clears her throat. You should get her some water. “We … gotta lot to talk about,” You nod, vigorously. “Then, y’know… maybe if all that talkin’ says things we’re cool with… then that could have pretty positive raditude levels…”

You chuckle heartily at this. “So this is like. Rails with pails??” she’s saying. “That’s cool, works for Solradia, and also I think Tuna used to eat Kurloz out all the time? I can do that if you want, that’s an equally valid form of wealth redistribution,”

“Maybe in a bit,” you say, and run your fingers through her hair. Right now, you just want to look at her.

You have all the time in the world, and for the first time in a very, _ immeasurably _ long time, that sentiment doesn’t feel like a curse.

You have your whole lives ahead of you, instead of your whole deaths. And hopefully, you can spend as much of it as possible with her.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to Rag for being much better at this than me, and giving those of us who aren't naturally dancestor-inclined some inspiration. And thanks to yellowbloods for their exhaustive compilation of all Homestuck dialogue, by character! (recently-completed! check it out!)


End file.
